Knowledge-workers and operators

The European Factories of the Future are expected to provide global manufacturing competitiveness, but also to create a large amount of work opportunities for the European population. Future factory workers are therefore key resources for industrial competitiveness as well as important consumers. However, the changing demographics and high skill requirements faced by European industry pose new challenges. Workers with high knowledge and skills (“knowledge workers”) will be scarce resources.

The classification shown below has been successfully applied under the Ace factories cluster projects (A4BLUE, Factory2Fit, HUMAN, INCLUSIVE, and MANUWORK) funded under the horizon 2020 call “FOF-04-2016: Continuous adaptation of work environments with changing levels of automation in evolving production systems”.  More details can be found in The ACE factories White paper - Human-centred factories from theory to industrial practice. Lessons learned and recommendations.

• Augmented and Virtual Worker
• Social worker - operator
• Collaborative worker (Human-Robot cooperation)
• Super-strong worker
• Health and happy operator
• Smarter and Analytical operator